5 July 2014: Another Thing

I just remembered something I wanted to work into the previous post, and I can’t find a place for it, so I will put it in a separate post here.

It is about language. The basic principle is that, in Kinyarwanda, almost everything is a verb: like, even nouns are verbs, at least in that most of them are derived in verbs. This reflects a basic and really interesting characteristic of the language: that there seems to be a pretty small number of actual words that are indivisible and not derived from anything else. A full range of meanings is attained by modifying that small number of basic roots.

Thus, the root -gur- gives us kugura “buy,” kuguriisha “sell,” kuguza “collect on a loan” and ikiguzi “price,” among others. Notice how those concepts are expressed with unrelated words in English, but in Kinyarwanda are all related. This pattern recurs constantly, and every couple of days a new connection occurs to me that I hadn’t thought of before.

The one I want to share here is not only one of the most dramatic, but relevant to the situation. So there is a verb gukwá, which means “to pay a bride-price.” The root of this verb is -kó-, but in the full word /ku-kó-a/ the sounds transform a little bit such that the o becomes a w and the high tone moves to the remaining vowel.

The first derivation I want to highlight is fairly straightforward, and it’s a word I learned very recently; inkwáano, which means “bride-price.” Now we parse this word as /in-kó-an-o/, where -an- extends the verb to make it reciprocal—i.e. “to pay each other bride-prices,” sort of—and the first and last segments are what make it a noun. So this word means “things that are given as bride-prices,” sort of. It’s worth emphasizing that in Kinyarwanda the verb is the base, whereas in English the noun is.

The second derivation is ubukwé. Before I tell you what it means, there are no extensions on the verb, just different prefixes and suffixes to make it a noun: /ubu-kó-é/. The prefix ubu- implies a time or place, so this would be understood to mean “a time when bride-prices are exchanged.” This is the Kinyarwanda word for “wedding.” I literally knew this word for two years, and only figured this out last week (at the wedding, as it happened).

Finally, and craziest of all, is what happens when you passivize that verb before nominalizing it. /ku-kó-w-a/ comes out as gukóobwa “to be given a bride-price,” where -w- is the passive marker. If we make this verb into a noun, /umu-kó-w-a/, we get umukoóbwa “someone who is given a bride-price.” This is the Kinyarwanda word for “girl.”

Think about that for a minute: The same verb, transformed into a noun by common, accepted rules, gives us the words for “bride-price,” “wedding” and “girl.” Is that not crazy?